'Angels in America'
[2002]: 'From a technical point of view, the project was
challenging in almost all respects - it required more than 400 digital effects
supervised by Richard Edlund; a sophisticated digital dailies approach
spearheaded by DP Stephen Goldblatt; and a crucial digital intermediate
performed at EFilm, Hollywood. Yet, the often mundane and under-appreciated art
of wire removal may well have been the most important technical achievement of
the entire massive project. That's because filmmakers were required to turn
[Emma] Thompson into a flying angel on-set in a particular way that was both
visually believable on the one hand and painterly/mystical on the other. For two
crucial sequences, Thompson wore a huge rig featuring gigantic angel wings as
she sat on a suspended bicycle seat hanging from the ceiling grid of a sound
stage at New York's Astoria Studios. Barraged with smoke and wind and cleverly
backlit, she recited Shakespearian-like dialogue into the maelstrom. Then,
Richard Edlund's effects' team faced the unenviable task of removing every trace
of the rig - a particularly complicated request considering both the size and
amount of the wires and the amount of smoke swirling around Thompson. "It
was yeoman's work, honestly, to perform that amount of wire removal,"
Edlund says of the effects' team he supervised. "This is the most difficult
wire-removal project I have ever been associated with. They shot those scenes so
that we had to not only remove the wires, but also to animate smoke back in and
make it mix seamlessly with real smoke. There were also times when the wind
machines blew [Thompson's] costume into a wire, or where you would see the bulge
of the bicycle seat - all that had to be repaired."

Given
the size and scope of the production, Goldblatt demanded and received from Mike
Nichols what he calls "unprecedented" involvement in all aspects of
the project, from the earliest read-throughs during pre-production in December
2001 through completion of the digital intermediate earlier this year. Serving
as the fulcrum of his two-year effort was Goldblatt's insistence on personally
creating and maintaining what he calls "a visual database" of the
entire project. To build this database, Goldblatt personally took digital photos
of "every significant setup, every day" throughout pre-production and
150 days of shooting. The DP shot those pictures on set, personally loaded and
indexed them into his Apple computer, and used Photoshop to color-correct them,
tweak contrast, saturation, density, and so on, to his satisfaction. Each night,
he emailed key images to the project's dailies colorist, who was responsible for
creating DVD and DigiBeta dailies for Nichols, HBO executives, and the rest of
the filmmaking team. Colorist Steve Scott at EFilm also referenced those
pictures during the digital intermediate phase, as did Richard Edlund's effects'
team throughout the post cycle. "This was more elaborate than any reference
material I had ever kept [on past projects]," says Goldblatt. "But it
was necessary. There was no way to shoot this project in continuity, especially
with the big stars like Al Pacino and Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson. We had to
shoot their scenes when they were available. Therefore, we were always going
backward and forward in time each week, often shooting portions of sequences
that were started months earlier. We needed some clear reference of what our
lighting and colors were when we shot those parts earlier. So I kept this visual
record, which helped with dailies, helped with shooting sequences out of order,
helped with shooting effects plates, and helped with the digital intermediate.
Since we had budget constraints, film dailies were not really practical. But
creating DVDs with this kind of color reference for the color-timer was the next
best thing. They gave Mike Nichols random access to jump from scene-to-scene as
he pleased, and they kept everything consistent. It was a big job creating these
images and keeping track of them, but well worth it." Goldblatt's
obsession with image consistency and quality control was so total that he even
went to Mike Nichols' home in New York during the shoot to calibrate Nichols'
computer monitor to match his own.' [From article by Michael Goldman on the
'millimeter' website, 2003.]